These battle zones were getting all the media attention and absorbing a great deal of García Luna’s time. Ciudad Juárez remained far down on the list of priorities or concerns. American intelligence was not picking up much on Juárez, either. The Congressional Research Service’s February 2008 report to Congress merely described the Juárez cartel as one of the four most important Drug Trafficking Organizations operating in Mexico and mentioned, almost in passing, that the Juárez cartel “may no longer be tied to the Federation due to murders committed by another Federation member” (the Federation was the name given to the Pax Mafiosa that had held Mexico’s main cartels in a tenuous peace since 2006). That clause was the only reference in the CRS report that suggested that things between the Juárez and the Sinaloa cartels might be taking a different turn.
To be sure, there were rumblings. García Luna’s people were picking up reports about Ciudad Juárez through the network of federal intelligence sources and what he heard worried him. He knew that in 2004 the Sinaloa cartel had executed Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes, the brother of the head of the Juárez cartel, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes. An enraged Vicente Carrillo Fuentes had purportedly put in a call to Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a long-standing ally of both Vicente Carrillo Fuentes and of El Chapo Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa cartel. Zambada was also a member of the so-called Federation to which the CRS report had made reference. “Are you with me?” Carrillo Fuentes is said to have asked. Zambada said he was. “Then I want you to deliver the head of that son of a bitch!” Carrillo Fuentes said, in reference to El Chapo Guzmán. But the head never came, and later El Chapo’s son, Edgar Guzmán, was assassinated in a hail of AK-47 fire when Juárez cartel operatives ambushed him in the parking lot of a shopping mall in Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa. This was the assassination to which the CRS was referring in its report.
Squabbles and conflicts between the cartels were nothing new. It was in the nature of their business. The tit-for-tat aggressions between the Sinaloa and Juárez people had been going on for a while, but these flare-ups had a way of being short-lived, after which the cartels went back to their day-today work. At the same time, García Luna was keenly aware that in the world of the drug cartels incidents like these also did not simply disappear from the institutional memories. They remained part of the backdrop to what went on between them, pools of resentment and discontent that could be tapped and which could burst into the open like molten lava when triggered by a new incident or by shifting allegiances within the cartel world. What was surprising was that such resentments could be sealed over at all, given that what most often fueled them were the assassinations of blood relatives, close friends, or long-standing associates.
By December 2007, the Gulf cartel had succeeded in beating back the Sinaloa cartel’s attempt to seize control of Nuevo Laredo. As a result, the Sinaloa cartel had turned its sights on Ciudad Juárez. García Luna knew that the Sinaloa cartel was preparing to make its move. The intelligence suggested that war had been declared, although in Juárez a relative calm reigned, like the still waters that precede the arrival of the hurricane. It was a war that was partly fueled by revenge, but it was also mobilized by greed: the Sinaloa cartel believed that the Juárez cartel had become weakened because of rivalries and internecine conflict, and it saw in this weakness an opportunity to move on what all of the cartels knew to be prime real estate—the city of Juárez, which had long been one of the most important transit points for crossing illicit drugs into the United States. Factoring all of these threads together, García Luna had decided it was time to alert Mayor Reyes Ferriz about the coming storm.
The Christmas warning to Reyes Ferriz foretold a coming war, but even with the warning the mayor had no way of grasping what lay in store or how his life and the life of his city would be irretrievably transformed. “I couldn’t imagine the possible scale of what was coming,” Ferriz would later tell me. And it was precisely that failure of the imagination, that failure to grasp or to conceive, that amplified the feeling of apprehension. The mayor of Juárez knew that somewhere beyond his window lay a threat, but he could not yet fully fathom its contours.
Note
1. Until April 2009, when a new federal law expanded its powers and authorized its investigative functions, the federal police was called the federal preventive police. I use the term federal police throughout this book because it is otherwise awkward and confusing to shift between the two names, which, in any event, refer to the same law enforcement organization.
CHAPTER 2
The Saulo Reyes Affair
On the morning of January 1, 2008, El Diario, the Ciudad Juárez newspaper with the widest circulation, opened the new year with a tally of the dead for the year that had just drawn to a close. The story was written by one of the paper’s most respected journalists, a man named Armando Rodríguez, who at the time had no way of knowing that before the newly christened year yielded to the next, the grim tallies that he chronicled so assiduously in his reportorial duties would come to include him, too.
El Diario reported that 301 people had been murdered over the course of 2007. The number was record-setting and created unease in the city. The 2007 tally exceeded the prior record of 294 deaths, registered in 1995, at the height of Juárez’s infamous femicides, when poor working women were being brutally killed. For almost a decade the city had been trying to distance itself from those ugly and inconvenient facts, facts that had brought Juárez to the attention of the United Nations Human Rights Commission and generated considerable unflattering national and international press coverage. Armando Rodríguez’s article in El Diario indicated that, of the violent deaths that had taken place over the course of the year, only nineteen had been women. Something else was now afoot in Ciudad Juárez, something that would soon displace the femicides as the city’s defining mark.
The recently appointed Juárez chief of police, Guillermo Prieto Quintana, appeared at a loss to explain the record executions, resorting instead to platitudes: “This number [of deaths] is truly worrisome,” Rodríguez quoted him as saying. “Even one death is unfortunate. With this record we are obligated to work on prevention in coordination with all of the police forces, and to reinforce a culture within the citizenry that will help us care for them and be vigilant.”
The words seemed to hang from the page: even one death unfortunate . . . we are obligated to work on prevention . . . coordination . . . vigilance. They had the hollow ring of a public servant grasping at straws. If the people of Juárez drew any succor from the police chief ’s words it was short-lived. As the January days rolled on, Juárez seemed to be on the same grim trajectory as the year before, averaging one execution or so a day, each dutifully added to the new, fresh tally of the dead.
Mayor Reyes Ferriz attempted to go about his responsibilities as if nothing more were amiss, as if he had not received the Christmas warning that something grave and malevolent was coming. And as difficult as it was to preside over a city whose death toll had an inexorable insistence, there were other duties that required his attention: the incessant meetings, the petitioners to be received, the ribbons to be cut, the budgets to be examined, the city council members to be negotiated with, and the ever present city and state political currents with which to contend. There was no shortage of things to demand the mayor’s attention, to take his mind off the prognostication that the federal intelligence officer had recently delivered that night in his office. And when his mind veered back to it, there was an enforced passivity that was disquieting: there was nothing for the mayor to do but to wait.
. . .
If on the surface Juárez had the look of any bustling border city, in early 2008 one event provided a window into the narco-world that lay just beneath that misleading appearance. On Wednesday, January 16, 2008, a vehicle loaded with 985 kilos of marijuana rolled out of Juárez and across the Bridge of the Americas into El Paso, Texas. The prior day, a man named Saulo Reyes had paid an individual posing as an Immigration and Customs Enforcem
ent agent $4,250 in cash as a down payment to ensure the passage of the load. Reyes had been introduced to the man in November and for almost two months they had been negotiating the deal. Once safely across, the shipment had been delivered to a home in Horizon City, a suburb of El Paso.
The following day, near eight o’clock in the evening, Saulo Reyes and the would-be ICE agent met again, this time in an El Paso parking lot. Reyes paid the man an additional $15,000, which was the balance due for the load that had crossed the previous day. The two men lingered for a few minutes, discussing Reyes’s plans for future shipments, when suddenly federal agents appeared as if from everywhere at once, swooping down to arrest Reyes. Unbeknownst to Reyes, over the course of the last two months all of the conversations between the two men had been recorded. The arrest of a man who was clearly a major player in the drug trafficking world made immediate headlines. However, one telling detail made the story all the more shocking: just three months earlier Saulo Reyes had been the director of operations of the Juárez Municipal Police Department.
. . .
I remember the first time I crossed from El Paso to Ciudad Juárez, walking across the Bridge of the Americas, or Puente Libre as it is known on the Mexican side, the same bridge Saulo Reyes’s driver had used to ferry close to a ton of marijuana across to the U.S. By then the war had already begun. The city was low-slung on the horizon, and beneath me the fabled Rio Grande was but a pale version of itself as it flowed slowly toward the east down a concrete trough. From the bridge I could see the Immigration and Customs Enforcement security corridor along the American side of the river as one of their ever-present green-and-white SUVs moved at a snail’s pace along the tamped-down dirt. Beyond, Ciudad Juárez lay spread out before me. The city seemed to be wrapped in a shroud of mystery and fear. From the apex of Puente Libre, Juárez’s violence already felt more immediate. I knew that the city had become a dark crossroads where Mexico’s narco-war was playing out, and that sinister reality permeated the air.
Juárez is spread out across the floor of the Chihuahua Desert, bounded on the west by a modest mountain range and on the north by the Rio Grande. In Mexico it has long enjoyed a reputation as a dynamic city whose people are innovative and entrepreneurial. A jump-off point for those wanting to cross the border into the United States, Juárez has no doubt drawn an unusually high mix of people with an adventurous bent. Juarenses are very attached to their city, even as it lacks the patina of glass and polished marble of downtown El Paso. In fact, prior to the eruption of the cartel war, even those with the requisite papers preferred their city to its U.S. counterpart.
Spring and fall can be glorious and temperate in the Chihuahua Desert but otherwise conditions in Juárez are harsh. Summers are interminable and hot; triple-digit temperatures parch the skin and all but the hardiest of drought-tolerant plants whither and die unless tended to daily. Winters are no better; cold and unforgiving, the desert winds blow through with a howl. Ironically, out of that harshness has grown a hospitable culture of hardworking and gregarious people.
In the 1980s, a boom in the assembly plant industry transformed the city profoundly and irretrievably. The demand for workers outstripped the local population and in the short span of two decades a wave of workers migrated from all over Mexico to work at the maquiladoras, as the assembly plants are called, and the city’s population tripled to 1.3 million. In the 1980s and 1990s the city boasted near-full employment, though salaries were (and remain) meager. Juárez became one of the crown jewels of the Mexican economy.
Juárez natives will tell you that they grew up feeling safe in this city. It was always run down, full of desert dust, and architecturally lackluster, but the people were open and kind. In the summers, when the desert heat soared, people in the poorer neighborhoods (that is, much of Juárez), slept unafraid on their porches and rooftops and in makeshift arrangements out in the open air. In fact, in most of these homes, the only thing separating families from the world beyond in the summer was a screen door and a latch. Violence, to the extent that there was any, tended to be downtown where the bars stayed open, where prostitutes worked the streets or out of brothels, and where the shooting galleries and opium dens catered primarily to Americans. Most of that world was foreign to the average Juárez resident. Cartel-related violence was handled discreetly and the city was mostly shielded from its brutality even as most knew of its existence.
Downtown, in the old Zona Centro, one used to find the pharmacies, curio shops, restaurants, bars, and the doctors and dentists that once catered to the tourists who crossed the bridges from El Paso in a steady flow. The bullring and the bulk of the brothels were in this part of the city as well. The bullring remains, but most of the other businesses have closed, with the exception of the occasional shop that holds on to the hope that the Juárez of old will make a comeback after the current bloodletting ends. The violence has eviscerated the tourist sector just as it has ravaged everything else in this city.
. . .
At the time of his arrest, Saulo Reyes was already a well-known figure in Juárez. The son of a Protestant Evangelical minister, he was far from the stereotype of the gold-chained, western-attired, pickup truck–driving narco. Reyes dressed in Armani suits, wore Cartier watches, and drove sporty cars. Indeed, he had all the markers of a golden boy: he was a young, dynamic man of middle-class origins who had risen quickly up the city’s economic and political rungs. At the age of thirty-five he was already a member of Coparmex Juárez, a powerful and influential business association similar to the American Chamber of Commerce, and he owned a string of Subway franchises, Kinsui Express franchises (specializing in Japanese takeout), and several Silver Steak restaurants. In short, in the eyes of those who knew him, or knew of him, Reyes was more likely to have been the subject of a GQ profile than a character around whom a narcocorrido might have been composed.
Saulo Reyes had reputedly come by his success partly under the tutelage of a man named Héctor “Teto” Murguía, who had preceded José Reyes Ferriz in the mayor’s office, serving a three-year term between October 2004 and October 2007. It was Murguía who had appointed Saulo Reyes to be the director of operations of the Juárez municipal police in January of 2007, a job second in importance only to the police chief because it meant that Reyes was directing and supervising all police operations within the city.
By his own admission, Saulo Reyes had no preparation or background for such a position, but Murguía was apparently indifferent to that fact. The explanation that Murguía gave at the time of Reyes’s appointment was that the city’s business leaders wanted a civilian keeping close tabs on what went on within the police department in order to make the police more efficient and responsive. But everyone could see what lay behind that fig leaf. In fact, the day after the appointment was announced, the president of Coparmex publicly and vociferously distanced himself from it.
It was not the first time that Saulo Reyes and Héctor Murguía had been linked. Prior to his appointment as director of operations, Saulo Reyes had been the subject of an extensive exposé by El Diario that had revealed that in the first days of the Murguía administration Reyes had registered six companies with the state bureau of commerce in Chihuahua City, the state capital. The daily reported that in the fifteen months between October 2004, when Murguía had become mayor, and December 2005, fully a third of the city’s purchases had gone to these companies, all of which were Sociedad Anónima (Anonymous Societies), which meant that the identities of the participating partners were protected behind a corporate shield. Three of these businesses shared the same physical address. When the El Diario reporter surprised the secretary occupying a desk at the location, she appeared bewildered and nonplussed, claiming that she did not know anything about the companies or what they did.
The exposé revealed that sometimes Reyes’s companies had been awarded contracts outright, by “invitation” and without competition from other vendors. At other times, Reyes’s companies had “bid” against
one another, giving the false appearance that the city contracts had been subject to open, competitive bidding. It was a charade. The businesses were obviously mere shells through which Reyes and his silent partners were profiting nicely from the cozy arrangement with the city.
It was only a year after the publication of the El Diario exposé that Héctor Murguía appointed Saulo Reyes to be the police department’s director of operations. At the time, José Reyes Ferriz was serving as the city’s tax collector, and he remembers the day when Guillermo Prieto, the police chief, came to his office. Prieto and Reyes Ferriz had known one another for years because Prieto had taken law classes from Reyes Ferriz at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez. They’d been friends ever since. “Prieto came to my office and said, ‘Look, I don’t like this Saulo Reyes situation,’” the mayor told me. The fact that Saulo Reyes knew nothing about police work troubled Prieto, but he also knew that Saulo Reyes was not trustworthy. Prieto told Reyes Ferriz that he’d made the decision to resign as chief if the appointment went through.
The next day, Saulo Reyes was sworn in as the director of operations as Guillermo Prieto looked on. The latter’s grim expression said it all. Prieto waited a day or two before resigning, along with fourteen other commanders, administrators, and police department attorneys. Prieto would later allege that his resignation was prompted by Saulo Reyes pressing him to participate with the Juárez cartel, although at the time he told the local press that he was resigning “out of dignity,” because he was “a professional” and it was evident that Saulo Reyes had no credentials for directing the operations of a law enforcement agency.
When Saulo Reyes became the number two man in the Juárez municipal police, many drew the inference that he was an operative of the Juárez cartel. He was leaving the world of business dealings and corporate franchises for a salary of eight hundred dollars a month. The word on the street was that he’d been placed there to be the cartel’s moneyman: the Juárez cartel needed someone to manage the protection money that the municipal police picked up on their behalf, as well as to deliver payments to the police who were on the cartel payroll. But Juárez was a world where rumor and innuendo were commonplace, and those swirling about Saulo Reyes remained at the level of abstraction and gossip until his arrest in El Paso.
The Fight to Save Juárez Page 3